November 8, 2009

Beyond Tolerance

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

MEDITATION

By the ancient Persian poet Hafiz

Admit something: 

Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise, someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this:

This great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one

Who lives with a full moon in each eye

That is always saying,

With that sweet moon language,

What every other eye in this world

Is dying to hear. 

Adapted from Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl

In this passage Frankl describes an episode in his experience at a concentration camp during World War II:

“We stumbled in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp.  The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles.... Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles...nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness....

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set to song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which we can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impact: Our salvation is through love and in love. I understood how someone who has nothing left in this world may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved....

In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all.... My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in one’s spiritual being, one’s inner self.   

I did not know whether my wife was alive.... There was no need for me to know. Nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. 

SERMON             

The moment comes late in the penultimate book of the Harry Potter series: headmaster Albus Dumbledor is explaining to a teen-aged Harry how it is that repeatedly he has managed to escape the murderous intentions of the villainous wizard Lord Voldemort. Though Voldemort has made a disciplined study of the most frightening dark arts of magic, Dumbledor says, there is one power that he overlooked that Harry possesses in surprising abundance: the ability to love. And in the final book the reader sees how the many ways that love has entwined these two opponents ultimately saves Harry from Voldemort’s direct attack and results in the master wizard’s demise.             

Part of the genius of J.K. Rowling’s immensely popular series is how she weaves through her elaborate story the threads of so many religious traditions, not to mention folk tales and fairy stories.             

And so it is no surprise that her tale should identify love as the most powerful magic of all. For, this, too, emerges from the vast storehouse of human wondering and imagining about the source of meaning in our brief spans, whether it be the Christian story of Jesus’ love, the Muslim teaching of Allah’s merciful care, the Buddhist bodhisattva’s discipline of compassion, and so on.

How, then, am I to explain the cringe I often observe among Unitarian Universalists when the talk turns to the role of love in our religious life? I remember a couple years ago when I did a sermon series on our Unitarian Universalist principles. I observed that the Commission on Appraisal, an association-wide elected body, was studying the principles with an eye to possibly changing them, and I invited you to offer suggestions as to what you might add, remove, or change. Several of you responded.

Our member Mary Alm wrote that one word that she felt was conspicuously missing from our principles was “love.” “How incomprehensible is it that we do not mention love anywhere?” she asked. “What the world needs now, not just for some but for everyone, what there’s just too little of. . . . Love’s gotta be a touchstone.”

That line received a few knowing chuckles, and I agreed with her, suggesting how it might be added. I think Mary’s observation, and, frankly, my own impetus in support, played a role in ensuring that the word “love” made an appearance in the mission statement that the Board of Trustees crafted last year with your help and approved at our annual meeting. By virtue, I suppose, of the natural rhythm of the sentence, “love” ended up as the last word of our mission statement. “We nurture individual search for meaning as we work in community for freedom, justice and love.” As such, it assumes an anchor position, grounding our understanding of ourselves and our work as a congregation.

And yet, as Frank indicated, I know that for some of you this is treacherous ground. Words matter, and especially when it comes to religion they come freighted with all sorts of ancillary meanings. If we say that we as a congregation work in community for love, what does that mean? What else are we saying? After all, we gather in this place with no common frame of reference theologically. Do we have anything like a common understanding of this love we say we are working for?

These are great questions that I hope we will find occasion to engage in many different settings. Today I’d like to offer some of my own reflections on what we might mean and why I believe we have placed “love” exactly where it belongs. 

Let me begin with some thoughts about why the word “love” might push some of our buttons. We come to this church from many different places, some of us from church communities where “love” had a specific theological context.

They were communities of smiles and hugs and lots of talk about love.And yet, Sunday mornings featured sermons centered on a narrow understanding of that love and a narrow path to it. Questioning that understanding and that path put one outside of the love proclaimed in that community. And so, people left, carrying with them, often, the wounds of breaches with family or friends and no little amount of suspicion when the talk in church comes around to love. 

Coming to this place, looking for a new start, they are wary of squishy words like “love” that can be twisted and turned against them. Better to shape our religious understanding with words that have sharp edges and clear boundaries. Steer clear of the touchy-feely stuff. I remember that a member of a congregation I used to attend would upbraid me when I took a turn in the pulpit as a lay person and would use the word “love” in my sermon. She said she didn’t think that “love” was the right word to use in that context. A better word, she said, was “respect.”

I understand the source of this woman’s concern. Across the ages churches have been guilty of using the language of emotion to manipulate people: riling them up with doom and gloom, or lots of happy talk. This concerned the founders of the Unitarian movement in Boston during the 18th century, who saw the revival preachers of the Great Awakening peddling “emotional exuberance” but little in the way of religion that would be a source of hope in people’s lives.

William Ellery Channing lead the way, arguing for the central role of reason in religion, and that commitment has remained at our core ever since. And yet, Channing also argued that the point of religion was not so much to accumulate knowledge as to develop character. By character he understood living an ethical life but also devoting oneself to the larger good. And one developed character, he believed, by developing habits of heart and mind that put oneself in the disposition to act rightly.

There are without doubt many qualities that contribute to right living in a spiritually centered way, but with all due respect to my friend back in Milwaukee I believe that love is not only central, but foundational to them all.

Love, it seems to me, lies at the core of our identity, that spark within that makes us who we are. It is what drives the best that is in us, that connects us to one another and fuels our compassion. It propels not only where we put our hearts, but our intellectual curiosity and thirst for justice as well. When we talk about what we love, we talk about what connects us most deeply to who we know ourselves to be, to an essential truth within us. But it is in community, in the interaction of person with person, that love becomes an active force in our lives, one that grows in strength the more it is employed.

I have always felt that our Unitarian Universalist first principle is in essence the principle of love. In affirming each other’s inherent worth and dignity we learn to appreciate each other and others in the wider world: having open eyes not only for each other’s beauty and gifts but also our weakness, flaws and fears, and finding cause, not for judgment, but for compassion. We see between and among us a kinship. I not only accept you, I see in you something precious. Even when we err, we carry the seeds of forgiveness and renewal in that deep understanding. 

If Hafiz is right, that we go about the world saying, “Love me,” with our eyes, I believe it is this kind of love that we seek. Not romantic love, but a quality of regard from another that is beyond tolerance: a matter not of simply putting up with each other, but of recognizing that in how we touch each other’s lives we are irrevocably involved in each other. That great pull to connect works on us, draws us in. And part of our work as a community is to follow it, to broaden and deepen it.

But it’s also true that love puts us at risk. Each time we open our hearts we make ourselves vulnerable. It brings to mind words from poem that I received recently from a couple at whose wedding I officiated: falling in love as like owning a dog.

“Love wakes you up all hours of the night with its needs. When it’s cold outside it lies between you and breathes and makes funny noises. Is love good all the time? No! No! Love can be bad. Bad, love, bad! Very bad love. Love makes messes. Loves leaves you little surprises here and there and needs lots of cleaning up after. Sometimes you want to roll up a piece of newspaper and swat love on the nose, not so much to cause pain, just to let love know: Don’t you ever do that again! Sometimes love just wants to go for a nice long walk because love loves exercise. It runs you around the block and leaves you panting. It pulls you in several directions at once, or winds around and around you until you’re all wound up and can’t move. But love makes you meet people wherever you go. People who have nothing in common but love stop and talk on the street. Throw things away and love will bring them back, again and again and again.But most of all, love needs love, lots of it. And in return, love loves you and never stops.” 

I want to suggest that this metaphor, amusing as it is for what it says about what goes on in relationships, informs our discussion as well. When we live so as to choose love as a first principle, we abandon the fiction that we are free-floating atoms, depending on no one and determining our own destiny. Instead, we understand that our destiny, our very being is intimately interlinked with all that is. We are drawn into the world’s messes and tragedies, but also thrilled by its victories and awakenings. 

It can feel overwhelming, leading us to wonder how much our hearts can possibly hold. And that is why we must learn, as every great prophet has taught, that love is a practice, a discipline. We must learn to hold both pain and joy, but not let either overwhelm us. We must take the time to get to know ourselves and learn to be present to others in ways that deepen our understanding and appreciation. We remember, after all, that the heart is a muscle and so is strengthened through exercise.    

Love looks soft but is remarkably resilient, and in the end is source of the deepest peace. When I am confused, angry, possessive, afraid, if I have the presence of mind to take a breath and reflect on what love teaches me, I can regroup and find a way forward in peace. The bullies of the world consider love a push-over. The treacherous seek to use it to manipulate others. Tyrants see it as a sign of weakness. Not a one of them understands. 

Victor Frankl’s awakening came amid the most horrid and degrading circumstances, slogging through icy mud, chained in a line of prisoners at a Nazi work camp. And still, bringing his wife’s face to mind, he was able to tap into that source within him that gave purpose to his days. It was in love and through love that he was raised above the numbness that the camp’s conditions had drilled into him. He found again the possibility of meaning in the world, and it saved him.

Now I have to add that this moment of awakening is not a place where one lives for long. We need to be careful of how and to whom we give love. We need to learn how to be with people of all kinds, how to engage difference and still find compassion. There is tough work to do and many years before it is completed. There are difficult circumstances to endure and little choice but to gut through them. We need to learn more, ask incisive questions, organize, and stay centered.

But we do this all from a grounding of deep appreciation and broad fellowship: in short, love. For us fragile, fallible folks, learning all that love has to teach is an unending task. We get fearful, frumpy and frustrated. We get self-righteous and insecure. We go trotting up dead ends and trip over foolish assumptions. We stumble, lose heart. We fall ill, we die.

And yet, in the days we are given, the time devoted to love and that which feeds love fulfills us as nothing else can. And in the hand that is held out in compassion, in fellowship, in love lies the hope for us all. The ancient Hebrew writers had the right idea, when it comes to making meaning in our lives, love is as strong as death.

And so I think we did the right thing in giving love an honored place in the statement that declares what we stand for and what guides our work here. We seek to provide a crucible, safe space where we might nurture each other in the journey of making meaning in our lives, confident that that work will embolden us to act in such a way that will advance freedom – freedom from oppression, from hatred, from fear – as well as justice that will achieve the reconciliation of all peoples, and love, sweet love: the glowing coal that longs for connection, what the world needs now, the spirit of life that sings in our hearts, that deepest, holiest force that joins us all.

May we have the courage and the strength to be guided by love, in love, through love in the days that we have, in this community that we make, in this blessed and beautiful world in which we live.